One or more aspects of the present disclosure relate to the field of electronic data processing, and more specifically, to cloning a source system of a multiple system landscape.
Large online data processing systems often appear as a multiple system landscape, also referred to as a multitier landscape, composed of different systems. A multiple system landscape may, for example, comprise a development system. The development system may be used for developing updates and modifications for a production system. The updates and modifications developed by the development system may be tested in a quality assurance system before they are applied to the production system. Due to business needs or legal regulations, often a large amount of data has to be stored by the production system. Historical data that is less frequently accessed may be offloaded from the production system to an external archive in order to reduce the amount of data stored in the production system and maintenance costs of the production system.
In order to improve the quality of the developed updates and modifications, as well as the accuracy and validity of tests performed, each of the development system and the quality assurance system is to provide an environment which is as similar as possible to the production system, i.e. the system of actual use of the updates and modifications. However, archived data of the production system may not be available in the quality assurance system or development system. Therefore, newly developed updates and modifications may insufficiently take into account archived data. Furthermore, performance tests in the quality assurance system might not be valid to predict performance in the production system. This may in particular be the case if the archive allows online access like, e.g. near-line storage.